Human Extinction and Moral Worthwhileness

In this article I make two main critiques of Kaczmarek and Beard's article ‘Human Extinction and Our Obligations to the Past’. First, I argue that there is an ambiguity in what it means to realise the benefits of a sacrifice and that this ambiguity affects the persuasiveness of the authors’ arguments and responses to various objections to their view. Second, I argue that their core argument against human extinction depends on an unsupported assumption about the existence and importance of existential benefits.

Negating the Human, Narrating a World Without Us

In this article, Mahlu Mertens discusses the narrative possibilities of representing a »world without us« in Ontroerend Goed's play of the same name for an audience or reader who obviously still exists. In »Negating the Human, Narrating a World Without Us«, she argues that part of the text manages to evoke, through its list-like form, tense, and accompanying rhythm, mixed feelings of sadness and comfort in the face of human extinction - instead of the feeling of 'activist melancholia' often elicited by ecological elegies.

Plastic Memories of the Anthropocene

Plastic has become a ubiquitous material on planet Earth. I use Bennett’s term, thing-power, to analyse various aspects of plastic’s onto-materiality. Generally considered a single-use material, plastic is easily discarded, leaving the individualized, private space of capitalism, and becoming a nomad, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, thus travelling through a smooth space. Then, plastic enters a symbiotic relationship with all biotic and abiotic bodies, becoming endo-plastic. As a geological layer, it becomes a “vibrant” memory of the nexus between capitalism and humanism, revealing its full political potential. Plastic is a witness, by-product and determinant of the Anthropocene, and its memory tells the political and ideological geostory (Donna J. Haraway) of human exceptionalism. Becoming-plastic is one way of overcoming anthropocentrism: not just by advocating for “post-humanism,” but by advocating for “posthum-ism,” even if this means “embracing human extinction” (Patricia MacCormack).

Consequentialism as an Intergenerational Ethic

Consequentialist morality is about making the world a better place—by promoting value and producing valuable outcomes. Consequentialist ethics competes with non-consequentialist alternatives where values are to be honored or instantiated rather than promoted and/or where morality is based on rules, virtues, or rights rather than values. Consequentialism’s main rivals in intergenerational ethics are contract-based theories. This chapter first argues that consequentialism has significant comparative advantages over its contract-based rivals, especially in relation to non-identity, the absence of reciprocity, and the need for flexibility and radical critique. These advantages outweigh the challenges facing any consequentialist intergenerational ethics—including cluelessness, counterintuitive demands, and puzzles of aggregation. The chapter then explores many varieties of contemporary consequentialism, arguing that the best consequentialist approach to intergenerational justice is agnostic, moderate, collective consequentialism. Different possible futures—including futures broken by climate change or transformed by new technologies—present new ethical challenges that consequentialism has the flexibility to address. Collective consequentialism can also resolve long-standing debates about the aggregation of well-being. The chapter ends by asking how consequentialist intergenerational ethics might evaluate threats of human extinction, incorporate the value of nonhuman nature, and motivate its potentially extreme demands.

Utopia and dystopia in the age of the Anthropocene

A product of Modernity, utopian and dystopian thought has always hinged upon an assessment as to whether humanity would be able to fulfil the promise of socio-economic, political and techno-scientific progress. In this paper, I argue that the predominantly dystopian outlook of the past century or so marked a move away from former views on human progress. Rather than commenting on humanity’s inability to build a better society, current dystopianism betrays the view that the human species as such is an impediment to harmonious life on Earth. I discuss the shift from utopia to dystopia (and back) as a result of regarding humans as a force that does more harm than good, and I consider the possibility of human extinction within the framework of dystopian and utopian visions. The final section of the chapter turns to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy as a fictional example that plays out the prospect of a world in which humans have all but become extinct.

Utopia without us?

As the prospect of self-authored human extinction increasingly appears as a plausible scenario of human futures, a growing number of efforts aim at comprehending it as the prospect of the world without us. Patrícia Vieira convincingly shows in her essay on utopia and dystopia in the Anthropocene that utopianism has become a prominent interpretive strategy to render the possibility of human extinction meaningful. This brief reflection argues against the feasibility of considering the world without us in utopian terms. It identifies three tacit assumptions in utopian interpretations of our disappearance: they (1) take for granted that prospects of human extinction and post-apocalyptic themes are of the same kind; (2) presume that the biological character of human extinction needs no special attention when situating it with the social character of utopian thinking; and (3) remain committed to an anthropocentric view in assuming that we are the ones to attribute meaning even to the world defined by our absence. In challenging these assumptions, the essay develops three theses on the relation of utopia and the prospect of the world without us.

Evaluating the Debate Thus Far over Moral Bioenhancement

To avoid “ultimate harm,” or human extinction, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu maintain that a species-wide, biological upgrade of human morality is required. To support their claim that we already possess biological kernels of their featured, prosocial attitudes, they rely implausibly on evolutionary psychology. Further, they support “neuroessentialism” and misconceive what genetic manipulation could deliver regarding complex phenotypic traits. Alongside their talk of augmenting prosocial attitudes, Persson and Savulescu stress that, to forestall ultimate harm, what we ultimately require is the elimination of antisocial acts. Though presented as two interpretive lenses on one endeavor, their prosocial and antisocial focuses represent different agendas for our moral alteration. Further, from their utilitarian standpoint, if making antisocial acts impossible to perform were a streamlined route to avoiding extinction, then this is what we should do. Persson and Savulescu’s antisocial focus, in particular, reflects a willingness to forgo what makes human existence worth conducting.